Radio Belly (4 page)

An old leather tanner named Yosef—guy with a moustache like you wouldn't believe. We stayed up late drinking clear liqueur that tasted like burnt hair while he told me about his best work, a yellowing hide pegged to the wall above us, a piece he'd tanned with such care, making sure to keep every freckle and detail in the skin. He'd tanned it in the old country the old way, rubbing the brains into the skin to begin the process.
Eet adds the peer-son-ality to the skeen,
he said, and his moustache jounced and bounced in such a way that I couldn't help but mouth the words along with him.

An upholsterer named Jesus. Together we picked our way through his shop, a graveyard of chairs waiting to be stuffed and covered. We passed a yerba mate gourd back and forth while he helped me choose a little loveseat.

I want you to know that technically, it's a double-wide chair, but I call it a loveseat because I'm a romantic and this is a love story. You should see the leather, so well-worn and gentled that it's transcended itself, the way the paper of an old map can come to feel like something else over time. And you should see how, when I step away, the leather of this loveseat remembers my shape, how it waits for my return. Day after day I sit here, looking out at the Baja coastline, thinking of her, snoozing the days of my early retirement away. Day after day I broadcast my story at the outer edges of the shortwave dial. Sometimes I have visitors, lovers and dreamers who've heard my story and made their way to the end of this long and bumpy road to see for themselves. They pay their money and I let them sit on my loveseat with the box of letters. There are some who find me cruel, some who question what I've done, but that's because they can't imagine a love like this. Sometimes, in the moments before or just after sleep, I can hardly imagine it myself.

T
HEY'LL COME AT night, the papers warned. They'll come hauling carts of empty wine bottles, all racket and ruckus, their skin the colour of city, the smog rubbed right in. They'll have no hygiene, no fixed address, no shoes or toothbrushes. Some will have no teeth. They'll come with their sores and their fleas and their nineteenth-century coughs, hacking and spitting, scratching and bleeding, right into our gardens and backyard gazebos. Like disease they'll come, fast and unforgiving.

“A new breed of homeless. A sign of the new economic reality,” the experts claimed, although it meant little to us at the time. We knew they were overeducated, unemployed and migrating, east to west, across the country; we'd heard rumours of how they set up at the edges of wealthy neighbourhoods, living off the fat of the land, hosting late-night salons in other people's living rooms, but we all had our own economic realities to contend with. Some of us had even been forced to lay off the help.

At some point we stopped reading the stories. Sure, we fit the profile: a pocket of stately homes just at the edge of downtown, but our city was the westernmost in the country, set apart from the mainland by a two-hour stretch of ocean. We knew the last mainland city had been overrun, but we never believed they would find their way here, to our island, our city, our Cherry Lane. After all, we convinced ourselves, how would they afford the ferry fees?

MY WIFE, MY daughter, and I were seated in the formal dining room when they arrived. Ever since we'd let Lucinda go, my wife, Kathy, had been doing the cooking. She liked to separate our carbs from our proteins, so that night it was all carbs: linguine with some sort of seed sprinkled on top and a side of pale, delicate potatoes.

“Would this be a fingerling potato?” I asked mere seconds before they appeared outside our window.

At first there were only two. He wore a tattered tuxedo and pushed a cart filled not with empty bottles, but with books. She was wearing mermaid-green taffeta, pearls and heels. The shoes were shaped like playground slides and not quite her size, so she weaved and wobbled like a child playing dress-up. There was a certain aura about them—not the mix of sex and decay I'd expected, but something almost noble, as if they'd been plucked from another time. They were both wearing pink sun-halos. Even the sunset had been recruited for this, their arrival scene.

My fingerling tumbled onto my plate, scattering seeds everywhere. My wife nodded to my daughter, then me, and we rose, moving to the window to watch the newcomers zigzag from the mouth of one driveway to the next, opening our recycling bins, the sturdy kind with wheels and lids.
Creak-slap
went those flip-top lids. Then the frenzied sifting—paper against paper against plastic.

“It's happening,” my daughter, Jennifer, said, the small envelope of her lips quivering, a certain mosquito pitch rising in her voice.

It was all too much for my wife—who swooned beautifully, allowing me to steady her. Then I remembered the boxes I'd stacked in front of our garage the day before, once I saw the Gregorys had put theirs out, each one marked CHARITY in Lucinda's thick black writing.

“What about the Large Garbage?” I asked my wife, tight-lipped so she wouldn't see me tremble.

For some reason the residents of Cherry Lane had taken to calling the third week of September “Large Garbage Week,” when we could just as easily have called it the Annual Charity Drive.

“I don't know why you insisted on putting that junk out so early,” my wife said.

“Because the Gregorys did,” I replied. “And the Felixes.”

“The
Greg
orys did because they left for
Flor
-i-da today,” she said. “And the
Fe
lixes did because
you
did.” When she was smarter than me in a particular matter she enunciated very clearly.

The three of us leaned toward the window then, holding our breath, but it was too late. The strangers were tearing at boxes, emptying them of clothing, holiday placemats and old bedsheets. We looked at the tangle of high chairs, dismantled bunk beds, retro skis and tennis rackets stacked up in front of our neighbours' garages, all the things we unearthed from basements and attics each September to prove our charity to ourselves and to each other. “One man's treasure” and all that.

“Constantine,” the woman called out from alongside our house, voice like a pencil scribble. “This one's a veritable jackpot.”

“Constantine?” my wife said.

“Veritable?” I said.

But by then Constantine had discovered Mrs. Felix's box of books. “Proust!” he shouted, fanning the yellow pages. “Pinky, come see!”

“Pinky?” my daughter laughed. “More like
Skanky.
”

“Enough!” my wife commanded.

“What did we even put
out
there this year?” my daughter whined. “Anything of mine?” Her voice had risen to a whinny. “Mom, you can't just let them—”

“Why not?” I said. “Charity is charity.”

“But I don't want to
see
it,” Jennifer said.

My wife let down the blind. I turned up the chandelier and we guided our Jennifer back to the table.

“Never you mind,” I said, putting my hand atop my daughter's, a wink for my wife. “Now, what can you tell me about the tenth grade?”

“Eleventh,” she corrected. Although my error made them both momentarily glum, they soon recovered themselves.

While my daughter talked about her newest elective, Money Management, and the horrors of a certain partner named Hez, we could hear them outside, hooting and clattering, hauling boxes down driveways.

“Your grandfather on
my
side made his fortune in money management,” my wife was telling Jennifer. “Foreclosures, refinancing, loss mitigation...” Jennifer was practically gurgling with excitement.

I tried to follow their conversation, but I'd heard it all before. Kathy was always delineating sides—hers, mine; good, bad; old money, no money. Besides, I was elsewhere. I was stabbing and twisting up bite-sized nests of linguine, trying to recall my own Proust days. My Balzac and Sartre and Camus days in the department of comparative literature, before Kathy persuaded me to switch to the school of business. I was arranging those pasta nests side by side on my plate because the appetite had gone right out of me, or rather it had shifted farther down to become something that had very little to do with food. The truth is, I couldn't quite recall what was in those boxes. In my race to keep up with the Gregorys, I hadn't even opened them.

I sat back in my chair, one hand fogging up my glass of Merlot, gripping the edge of my mahogany table, trying to take comfort in the largest room of my—our—large, large home. Antique cabinets, upholstered chairs, cut crystal: everything so finely crafted. Everything so sturdy, and yet I couldn't help but see myself as the most tender inside part of that life: me as mincemeat, as mollusc, as morsel.

IN THE MORNING, charity was strewn across our lawns. Clothing clogged gutters and hung from tree branches. Old magazines and once-loved toys cluttered the sidewalks. I was standing underneath the “two hours max at all times” sign, untucking parking tickets from my windshield wiper—one of the disadvantages of living so close to the city—and taking in the damage when I heard a chattering from under our hydrangea. I crept closer. It was tuxedo man, Constantine, reading—no,
reciting
—something to Pinky beneath a canopy of flowers. For a moment I envisioned them curled just so under a bridge in a large mainland city, inhaling exhaust fumes, scavenging for fish in diseased rivers, munching on gristly berries by the sides of highways. I felt a sudden kick of pride for having provided a downtrodden man with a flowering bush to sleep beneath—after all, it was
my
bush he'd chosen—and for a moment I longed for true charity, something beyond Large Garbage once a year. I imagined bringing this man into my home, giving him a shower and a shave, perhaps an old suit and a rudimentary lesson in entrepreneurship. Or if he wasn't interested in that, at least a proper fishing rod, some bait and tackle.

But this line of thought came to its snarled end when I noticed the woman was wearing something long, white and glittery, something familiar and poofy, and then it hit me: this skank was wearing my wife's cotillion gown. I could see it then. How, in my zeal to best the Gregorys, I'd not only grabbed the boxes marked CHARITY, but also those marked KEEPSAKES.

“Hey,” I shouted, coming across the flowerbed at them. And I kept on, “Hey-hey. Hey.
Hey,
” until I was close enough to reach out and grab Pinky. That's when I realized I didn't actually want to touch her.

The man stood and faced me. Now he was reading to me from the open book:
“Étonnants voyageurs. Quelles nobles histoires.”
French: I flinched. I could barely tell one word from another these days. It was impossible not to hear his words as a personal insult.

“Nous lisons dans vos yeux profonds comme les mers,”
he continued. There I was, the enraged landowner, standing inside his orbit of stench and he could care less.

“Montrez-nous les écrins de vos riches mémoires...”

I recognized those words from a poem I'd once loved and was reminded of my leisurely undergraduate days, reading Baudelaire beneath trees. But I snapped out of it when I finally understood what was going on here—that I had also mistaken my own box of keepsakes for Large Garbage.

Something was rustling in the man's pants just then, and I looked down to see that he was scratching and rearranging himself
down there.
He was bouncing his meat at me. My gaze jolted back up to his face. Then his hand, the same one he'd used to scratch himself, was coming toward me. I could see his crumbling yellow nails, the grime built up in the creases of his palms. For a moment it seemed he would make some apologetic gesture, but then he opened his filthy crack of a mouth and said: “Would you happen to have any spare change?”

“No. No-no. No. No. No change. Sorry,” I stuttered. I was a small angry man, a man of small anger. “This is our—
my
property and I command you to get
off,
” I hollered. “Go-go. Please go.”

He didn't run as I had hoped but turned to offer his hand to Pinky.

She looked at the stack of parking tickets pinched in my hand. “You shouldn't park in front of your house anymore.”

She was right, but ever since Kathy had given Jennifer a BMW (and my spot in the garage) for her sixteenth birthday, I'd had no choice.

“What was it the Marquis de Sade said?” She was wiggling into her heels. “‘Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.'” She stepped out from behind the hydrangea then, dainty as a debutante.

Constantine smiled. “Or, ‘Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud,'” and then he looked at me just long enough to break the social contract. “You, sir, are you a miserable little creature?”

My mouth flapped: open, closed.

He threw his head back, laughing, and then they walked—no, sauntered—down my driveway. I didn't chase after them. I was stunned, speechless. And I was late. Again. As always.

I slammed into the car and headed for work, the previous night's parking tickets piled on top of all the others on the passenger seat beside me.

AT THE MINISTRY of Revenue I was hardly in the office door before man-faced Rhanda was on me.

“You're late,” she said, and I couldn't help but notice in that particular light she really did have something like stubble. She was keeping pace with me down the hall, yapping and handing me memos. “The Schmidt case is being pushed ahead. Dan wants all the forms by noon. But he wants to talk to you first. ASAP. As soon as you're done with—” she looked at her clipboard—“Hez? Yes, Hez. She's waiting for you.”

“Hez?”

“Hez. Your daughter's friend?”

“Deal with this, would you?” I said, handing Rhanda my dirty travel mug.

IT SEEMED THE little blonde princess Hez was there to talk to me about Money Management while my Jennifer was somewhere across town talking to Hez's father about the same thing. It seemed it was a competition of sorts. So I explained my position to her, then talked about taxation policy and departmental divisions and the various meetings I attended in any given week, but it wasn't good enough, somehow.

“Wait,” she said. “So you don't manage any
actual
money?”

“I'm afraid it's not that simple,” I said. “I'm more of an overseer really.”

She waved her hand around. “So this is all just
files
and stuff? There's no actual
money
here? This office is more about paper pushing?”

“Well, Hez, I suppose it is,” I said and then I gave her the number of my brother-in-law, the investment banker, before showing her out.

I stopped by Dan's office.

He squashed his blunt finger up against the Schmidt file, a couple of eighty-year-old artists who had managed to evade property tax for more decades than I'd been alive. “Might I inquire when you were planning on dealing with them?” he did, indeed, inquire.

My tongue was fat and lazy in my mouth.

“Even the sweet and the old have to pay their taxes, Henry,” he said, “but that's not what I really wanted to talk to you about.” Looking grim, he pulled out another file, one I'd never seen before. “Well, Henry, in keeping with the new
Recession Measures Act,
our friends over in collections have given me a heads-up about your parking ticket situation.” He cleared his throat. “Are you aware,” he asked, “that you received a summons to go to court several weeks ago?”